Public Attitudes Towards the Regulation of Firearms

Support for the stricter regulation of firearms is widespread both in terms of the range of measures endorsed by the public and in terms of the high level of public approval for such measures. As Table 1 shows, majorities in 2006 favor all proposals to expand regulations: 91% support making it illegal to use guns while under the influence of alcohol, 85% want the sale of 50 caliber rifles limited, 82% want the sale of semiautomatic, assault weapons limited, 80% favor criminal background checks for all sales of guns, including private sales between individuals, 79% back requiring a police permit before a gun could be purchased, 76% believe that terrorist attacks have increased the need for stricter gun control, and 54% want illegal gun sales to be punished more severely than illegal drug sales with another 37% saying that punishments for illegal gun sales should be as tough as penalties for selling illegal drugs

Internet Privacy and Self-Regulation: Lessons from the Porn Wars

The availability and adequacy of technical remedies ought to play a crucial role in evaluating the propriety of state action with regard to both the inhibition of Internet pornography and the promotion of Internet privacy. Legislation that would have restricted Internet speech considered indecent or harmful to minors has already faced and failed that test. Several prominent organizations dedicated to preserving civil liberties argued successfully that self-help technologies offered less-restrictive means of achieving the purported ends of such legislation, rendering it unconstitutional. Surprisingly, those same organizations have of late joined the call for subjecting another kind of speech--speech by commercial entities about Internet users--to political regulation. With regard to privacy no less than pornography, however, self-help offers Internet users a less-restrictive means of preventing the alleged harms of free speech than does state action. Indeed, a review of privacy-protecting technologies shows them to work even more effectively than the filtering and blocking software used to combat online smut. Digital self-help in defense of Internet privacy makes regulation by state authorities not only constitutionally suspect but, from the more general point of view of policy, functionally inferior

Principal components analysis in the space of phylogenetic trees

Phylogenetic analysis of DNA or other data commonly gives rise to a collection or sample of inferred evolutionary trees. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) cannot be applied directly to collections of trees since the space of evolutionary trees on a fixed set of taxa is not a vector space. This paper describes a novel geometrical approach to PCA in tree-space that constructs the first principal path in an analogous way to standard linear Euclidean PCA. Given a data set of phylogenetic trees, a geodesic principal path is sought that maximizes the variance of the data under a form of projection onto the path. Due to the high dimensionality of tree-space and the nonlinear nature of this problem, the computational complexity is potentially very high, so approximate optimization algorithms are used to search for the optimal path. Principal paths identified in this way reveal and quantify the main sources of variation in the original collection of trees in terms of both topology and branch lengths. The approach is illustrated by application to simulated sets of trees and to a set of gene trees from metazoan (animal) species.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOS915 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Paid Sick Days: Attitudes and Experiences

Analyzes survey findings on Americans' views on the importance of paid sick days as a basic workers' right and support for legislation guaranteeing paid sick days by age, race/ethnicity, income, education, family structure, and political affiliation

Fluorescence for high school students

In a not obligatory series of lessons for high school students in the Netherlands we discuss the fluorescence aspects of anthracene. These lessons were developed because HiSPARC (High school Project on Astrophysics Research with Cosmics) detection of cosmic rays are available for different secondary schools. With the help of special designed scintillator detection stations, containing anthracene, cosmic rays can be detected. Fluorescence of anthracene is one of the topics discussed in these series of extra curricular lessons aimed at excellent pupils working on cosmic radiation within the HiSPARC - project.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figures, 5 reference